VN - Ren'Py - Completed - Between Salvation and Abyss [Final] [Ethan Krautz]

This is one of these games that are so bad that it actually becomes good.

I'll start by telling the few points I genuinely liked:

• Story idea is original-ish, including secret organizations, mythical/legendary race-formed gangs fighting each other, and a good amount of secrets to unveil.
• Good character development (for most of them).
• Some really good-designed girls (although not all of them).

And that's it.

Honestly, this could pass as a story written by a horny high school teenager:

• MC with a horse-sized wiener, with a secret power to seduce whichever MILF he wants with tiny to no effort at all.
• Several characters have weird body proportions: boobs (50%), and ass (30%) with the remaining 20% being also distributed oddly.
• MC has a thing for prolapses, and whichever female (either the girls, "landlady" or the grandma) he bangs, he leaves them with anal or vaginal prolapses (spoiling and making the lewd scenes very gross).
• He literally fucks whichever female there is in the game, with no effort, and all of them fall for him instantly.
• The story has a good start, even tho the MC is really a monster (figuratively, although later he does become a literal monster) it is kinda "justified" by his background story. Sadly it starts derailing as the story starts introducing more and more legendary elements, making less sense every time. In the latter chapters, the story was so bad that I perceived it kind of like a joke as if I was reading a tale written by a stoned teenager.
• It grossed me out that MC fucks (and in detail) even the grandma. And no, that's not a GILF, it's a heavily wrinkled, old, and nearly toothless grandma.
• There's no real choice in this game. With the name I'd think that you could choose a good or bad path at least, but whatever you "choose" you still are forced to follow all the content nonetheless, including rape/torture scenes with no option to skip.
• You don't even get to change the MC name, which by the way seems to be the name of the developer.

I honestly got kinda sad for this game, because there are characters that I liked, but that lose relevance with all the defects in the story.

Edit to version 10 P2: The story is a complete and utter mess now. It does not have any coherency at all, and it barely makes any sense. Not worth reading.

This game is a jumbled mess. The story has a terrible pacing issue. You jump from one thing to another with very little way in way of explainable transition. The dialogue is bland and littered with errors. The models are nice, there is that.

If you are looking for supernatural stories, this is one of the best story lines out there. Whether you are looking for a wank or story line, I highly recommend this game. Really looking forward to the next update!

I liked the game more when we had choices, now it's just full of non sens...
Such a waste of good models on a very bad storyline. ..
The game is the easy sex type of games where npcs just want to open their legs for MC without a rational reason as if they were starving for a decade.

Love this game. The game has the most beautiful character (Monica) I've ever seen in a videogame of this kind, ever, and I've seen quite a few... -I also like Jessica-. It has lots of anal sex. Very good art style and some interesting characters.Some things are a bit....hardcore, which I am not a big fan of, but it's palatable. Great game overall

Pro:
- a few girls look good/normal

Contra:
- a few girls have such big breasts and asses that it just looks abnormal
- story could have been interesting but the boring writing destroids it completely
- almost no choices and the few you have don't impact anything
- because of the lack of choices you can't choose the girls Ethan (MC) should go for
- most lewd scenes are about anal

1/5 Stars

I had to give up on this one.

First another V/N where the MC has a ridiculously over sized dick like some kind of genetic mutation, a trope that has gotten old. I'm not sure why some Devs don't like realistic proportions.

The sex scenes aren't very sexy, especially the anal ones which you aren't given any choice over.

The MC is disturbed and worse. He's no better than the supposed bad guys he goes after. He's even a dick about it when getting a blowjob from either his sisters and the anal sex scene with Monica in the hotel had a gross ending.

The writing is not good and there were times when my thought was " what, who talks like that?" The plot gets a bit convoluted and at times it feel like something was skipped over. It goes from point A, steps around point B and straight to point C.

Not one I can recommend.

The disjointed English is inescapable, and occasionally causes considerable miscommunication and confusion.

The story concept is great, and the world building is interesting, but the plot is poorly constructed and wanders around at random without any sensible progression.

This really isn't a game where there are many choices for the player to make, and the choices you can make don't seem to have any significance to the direction of the story.

The renders are adequate, but not impressive, and the scenes are so repetitive and formulaic that this seems to be a showcase of the creators fetishes more than an attempt at creatively engaging the player.

This lack of choice, and absence of a clear direction, makes this game a long, frustrating, perplexing, story on rails that I eventually started just skipping to get to the next scene, which usually ends up just being the same scene with a different girl.

I like this game a lot. It's very good.
The ladies in this game are hot with a lot of variety.
I like that the mc is a badass who goes through hell and back to save someone he loves.
the game has great renders and the animations are well done.
Amazing harem game.
Keep up the good work dev!

Decent renders and animation. Story is pretty good. Some translation issues, but nothing that seriously hinders the product. I only wish there were more depravity in the dungeon scenes. It's nice to able to rename your relationships with other characters. Overall excellent experience!

Stilted as the 'all your base are belong to us' dialogue is (and fair play, the dev admits this), I can't believe it would read any less functionally or more erotically in Russian or Spanish or Uzbek or whatever the dev's first language is. It's almost (almost) cute how technical issues get resolved in side-scenes like going to the store to buy lightbulbs, redecorating your sister's room or that old staple, buying out the restaurant to eat alone with your Mom. Where she orders 'rice with bacon stew' for both of you, of course (chef's special in Tashkent?). Dark forces, look-don't look choices. Each time you get nearer to the jackpot, all three cherries, it's just another pull on the old one-arm bandit.

This is a horrible game, ugly models, bad story and horrible dialog writing

The models are bad, like the mom's boobs and ass is soo big it looks obviously unreal and to the point it starts looking less attractive and more disfigured

And what's with those pimples/spots all over the face with other girls?



And the writing is extremely horrible

Dialogues feel extremely dry

When the MC returns home after so long time, the family members reaction feels overdone, and the conversations feels extremely dry, it has no depth, feels like generic dialogue writing by a grade schooler.

It's obvious that this game wasn't created with passion rather created just to catch on the hype train of AVNs and milk that patron cow for as long as possible

The game proved to be a disappointment for me. I went as far as Ch7 part 1 so maybe some things will change from now on but I doubt it.

Right off the bat I need to tell you that Between Salvation and Abyss is not a game where you can be either good or bad when it comes to sex. 80-90% of content is about vanilla stuff that just repeats itself with almost every woman you meet. If that wasn't enough they are all almost begging you to bed them and despite this things move painfully slow with them. You get no satisfaction that you've done something (except for the 2 sex slaves) because of how they are throwing themselves at you. The dark side (a couple of sex slaves) is barely 10% -20% of the content and it's there as a side note and always rushed. The choices (in general not jut for the dark stuff) are non existent even when compared to the average XXX visual novel. The story is fine but it gets overly complicated without adding anything for the XXX content so it's hard to keep interested.

So despite the effort put in it and the decent amount of content I can't recommend it.

It's an interesting story, reasonably well-developed. Some of the models are cute and sexy, and the renders are done well. My main complaint about the game is similar to that in some other reviews -- lack of choice about sexual content. I am totally uninterested in sex that results in anal prolapse, but that's what most sex in this game is. If that floats your boat, this is the game for you, but not me.

*story: 5 stars

*script: 3 stars I see a lot of grammar/sentence errors and sometimes someone is talking and it will have another persons name instead of the correct person .

*lewd scenes: 2 stars. lack of sexual preferences is very annoying. just about every time it is auto anal. Anal, anal, and more anal. I never pick anal in VN's but in here you are forced. Had to start skipping the lewd scenes. It would be 5 stars if it let you pick vaginal on the people you love. Leave the anal raping for the slaves/enemies!

Goofy meandering narrative with some decently fappable scenes. If you like male dom and incest you can probably get something out of this as there are a lot of decent scenes with the standards: mom, sis, aunt. The models are nice looking and have a bit of variety to them and the animations are passable, though the scenes tend to be on the short side. Lots of anal, which is good but the dev seems to have a thing for prolapsing anuses that i could have done without.
recommended for anyone who likes incest and male dom and is just looking for a fap
not recommended for people who need a solid narrative and deep characterizations.

I had a good time with this, nice story and good quality renders. Though not a lot of choices in this, it more like reading a story.

It was a bit hard to get in the story at the beginning, but that got better in time and as I said earlier there's not a lot of choices to make so story/gameplay wise it doesn't really matter.

I can get the other reviews saying the mc is being used and is oblivious to it, but I think it works story wise. It fits the character and his story. From his point of view with his background and history I think it makes sense he act's the way he does.

All in all I would play this again and can't wait to see how it all plays out in the end.

This VN was reasonably enjoyable the first couple of chapters.

Some mystery and tragedy was very nice and interesting.

the character personalities was pretty alive and varying, the females are pretty hot and well designed.

MCs personality is great, hes ruthless and an asshole which makes it far more interesting than the typical emotional mary sue simp MC that everyone seem so obsessed with.

writing was great, not perfect mind you, but at least readable.


Then it all falls apart, the mystery aspect of the VN becomes tedious and annoying because its drawn out for too long and more and more mysteries is introduced into the story which ends up piling on top of the old ones.

the female characters all become a bundle of issues where every single chick has some tragedy or boho thing going for them which would've been interesting if it wasn't present in every single one of them


the MC turns out to be a puppet for some organization yet too dumb to realize it even when people VERY clearly keeps hinting at it.


Honestly i would list a dozen more bad things but i dont have the energy for it.
This was an amazing VN turned garbage because the dev couldnt come up with something new and instead repeats things over and over just slightly differently.

At the start my first thought was while it is rough the game has potential but unfortunately the longer you play the worse the game gets.

One of the biggest problems of the game is technical, some scenes are repeated, dream sequences didn't work for me and some text has the wrong person attached, the art and spelling/grammar is passable but needs some work, mostly background and animations for the art.

For once the characters are the big plus for the game with the MC being a realistic interpenetration of someone who would have gone through what he did, honestly is great just to not have a simp MC, the women are quite varied in both art style and personalities(on a personal note, 80's pubic hair should stay in the 80's), sex scenes are good with a nice verity of positions and kinks.

I didn't find any choices that changed or directed the game but for once i think this game would be better as a pure kinetic novel without any choices as it fits the story better to just follow one direction.

While the story here is actually quite interesting and at the start very good it quickly develops problems, the first being it gets quite confusing figuring who is who and who is on which side and how many sides there are(a character guide would help with this or at least a recap every now and then), second is the story becomes lazy and things start to make less and less sense once the MC meets the woman in red,
As a side note the whole Katya forced sex thing is a total 180 of the MCs tough guy, take charge, dom personality which is disappointing and shows again how the game gets worse the longer it goes on.

Story 3/5 (good at the start)
Sex 3/5 (OK)
Characters 4/5 (Realistic)
Art 3/5 (passable)
Choices 1/5 (none but not really needed)
Kinks 3/5 (some but no huge focus on them)

Version played: Ch 6, part 1

Interesting story with many variations (of body type) for the female characters. The renders are not very HD but it is fine and serves along well with the tone of the story. Recommended to use the multi-mod for mostly the ambient music.

As for the negatives I think it is more of a taste that is not for me because the sex scenes are mostly the rough and violent type and consist (mostly) of anal scenes. I understand it is part of the dark story tone, it is just not to my flavor.

Still give it a high score because the story piqued my interest.